


The Hollow Men

by Whitnium



Category: Tales of Vesperia
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood, Character Death, Depression, Experimental Style, Gen, Hallucinations, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mental Anguish, Mental Breakdown, Spoilers, Suffering, Suicidal Thoughts, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:20:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22951654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whitnium/pseuds/Whitnium
Summary: A ‘Bad End’ AU following the events of the Sword Stair. Things fall apart in the aftermath.MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH.Please mind the tags. This is not angst with a happy ending, this is everyone suffers and nobody is happy.Written for Tales of Big Bang 2020
Kudos: 10
Collections: Tales Big Bang 2020





	The Hollow Men

**Author's Note:**

> The main title, section titles, and supplementary text are all taken from two T.S. Eliot Poems, "The Hollow Men" and "The Waste Land."
> 
> I experimented a little with stylistic things and probably broke a lot of writing rules because I like to pretend I'm better at this than I actually am. ;)
> 
> The art for this fic will be coming soon.

  
And I will show you something different from either  
Your shadow at morning striding behind you  
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;  
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Between the idea  
And the reality  
Between the motion  
And the act  
Falls the Shadow

**i. i had not thought death had undone so many.**

He knows that this is real because his heart never hurts like this in his dreams. She is watching him, but forlornly so; her eyes are crystalline with tears. The sight of her this way is torture, would undo any other who did not bear his burdens. He levels his weapon. Only the resolve of years keeps it from falling from his hands. His strike is merciless and she collapses in his arms but slowly, weightlessly; he catches her and her body explodes into a thousand feathers, pure white and glittering like stars.

They slip through his fingers as he tries to hold them, collect around his feet until he is ankle-deep in them. He sinks to his knees, searches for any trace of her in the multitude, clutches the feathers in clenched fists until the shafts snap like bones. The broken pieces are blades in his palms, numb his hands like poison.

_—poison of this world—_

His grip falters and the feathers drop from his deadened fingers. Their vanes are stained with blood and they fall with incredible force, slam into the pile below with audible crashes. The red is stark against the white and he finds her at last in the pattern of horrific color, arranged in a caricature of her face. The sound of her scream suddenly echoes inside his head and his chest and his heart and the feathers scatter in a panic, slam against him with weight like lead, knock him down and beat him. He curls his arms over his head until he can no longer feel the blows, only the crushing weight of anger and loathing and regret.

_I’m sorry—_

Everything starts in the castle.

Everything ends in the castle.

Yuri is reliving his journey of the last several months in reverse, a sickening force as insurmountable as gravity pulling him back to what he left behind only strip him of everything he gained, like an animal returning to the place they were born in order to die. 

The prison smells of sweat and rust, still unchanged even after all the times he’s been here. It would be comforting if his heart were still capable of the emotion. Instead, the nostalgia curls and dies in the bitter air in his lungs and for a heartbeat he can scarcely breathe for the acridity of it. He staggers and leans against the bars of the first cell, gasps for clean air like a drowning man until his vision clears. 

He continues to the last cell on the left as and finds Raven splayed on the slab of the bed, one arm at his side and the other draped across his face. Asleep to an outside observer, but Yuri can feel the older man’s eyes on him as he approaches, the tension like a charge on the air. 

“Raven.”

An infinitesimal change in posture, a hitch of breath from the supine body. 

“Get up.”

Raven jerks into motion in an imitation of human movement—painfully, like there is too much weight for his bones to bear. His eyes slide sideways and meet Yuri’s for one a moment before they focus elsewhere; he does not turn to face his accuser, shrugs noncommittally instead of speaking. 

“You better start talking, Old Man.” 

At last Raven turns. “What do you want me to say? ‘I’m sorry?’” He spits the word with all his contempt behind it. “Sorry ain’t gonna bring her back, kid. It ain’t gonna undo what I did.” 

Yuri grits his teeth and swallows his acrimony, makes a derisive noise to begrudge the other man’s point.

Raven’s expression does not change. “You come here to settle things with me?”

It is Yuri’s turn for silence. _Why is he here? Does he still want more blood on his hands?_ He glances down at his sword—Dein Nomos now wrought with—

His thoughts trail off and the weapon feels suddenly unwieldy in his grip and he can feel the blood on his palms, hot and slick and sickening; he suddenly turns away without another word and is a step from the cell exit when Raven’s voice calls after him.

“You know damn well what needs to be done.”

Yuri does not pause in his exit: “you don’t deserve it.” His tone is a blade to the throat, severe against the older man’s exposed flesh until he pulls it away an instant before before the killing blow.

Raven mutters at his back, defeated: “I know I don’t.”

There is no need for secrecy on Yuri’s second escape from the prison; only the castle’s ghosts patrol its hallways now and they scatter from the severity in his footsteps, as loud as cannons in the silence, heavy with the weight of the world. He watches his reflection on the polished floors as he walks, studies the intricate patterns of the tiles until a streak of blood arrests his progress. He steps back in surprise and the castle walls fall away and a harsh wind cuts against his face and the air is alive with frightening energy and he falls to his knees with her body heavy in his arms and—

“Estelle,” Yuri can scarcely breathe. All of their agony is contained in her name.

The change in her expression is instantaneous; she hears his voice at last but it is a revelation come seconds too late. 

_Yuri._ Her mouth moves to form his name but she lacks the strength to voice it. 

Her chest shudders and the blade trembles with it. She searches for him with her eyes, sightless through a moribund veil in her last seconds. Estelle dies quietly—not like Ragou and Cumore, screaming and begging for absolution—but with one last inconsequential flutter of her heart, a final sigh of breath, a soul departing in resignation. 

Terrifying fear spreads like darkness at the corners of Yuri’s eyes: the cloying stench of aer, the chaotic red sky, the crackling of magic on his skin. Estelle, so suddenly still, her eyes open to forever behold the horror of her power, even in death. Her mouth slackened in an apology, interrupted.

_I’m sorry._ His voice and hers in concert in his head. 

Reality crumbles; nothing exists between them but sword that connects their souls, now half buried in her chest. The handle is agony to Yuri’s fingers but he cannot pull his hand free: his rage is like electricity, grounds them together no matter how he tries to fight it. He stares in horror, howls an incoherent mess of curses until sparks fly from his fingertips and the pain lances through his thoughts—his fist suddenly collides with a stone surface; a punch thrown in rage and desperation. He pulls his hand back, speculatively curls his fingers, watches glistening beads of blood grow on a split between his knuckles. 

He is no longer on the Sword Stair. A face of stone looms above him: The Statue of the Goddess. His hand falls to his side, injury forgotten.

_Fuck._ He’s not sure if he says it out loud or in his head and he can’t help but remember how Estelle made her decision to leave the castle beneath the gaze of this very same statue. Yuri can see her face that day—a mixture of trepidation and determination—reflected in the marble canvas above him.

Something grabs at his hand and he whirls. All sensation suddenly leaves him, his breath is ripped from his throat with a curse he can’t voice. 

_Your hand—it’s injured._

It’s not a memory but it’s not quite her voice either and nothing makes any sense for a terrifying second and the entire world seems to fade out of existence until his eyes focus on her. 

Yuri fights with her name because the last time he spoke it he was screaming it and she was dying by his blade in her chest and the last time she spoke his name she could not speak it for the blood on her lips and how the fuck is she—

_Let me take a look at it._

“Estelle.” 

She continues her ministrations without acknowledging him; there is no light, no warmth of the healing magic he knows all too well. The blood continues unabated from his wound—his hand is red with it now, slick between his fingers like hers was hours, days, a lifetime before. 

She steps back, hands clasped before her, watches him expectantly. 

“You’re—” he stalls, incapable of continuing for the weight on his chest. What can he say to the person who died by his hand? He can feel her still, leaning against his chest, her agonal breaths like something from a nightmare as he wishes for it to end some way other than this. 

He reaches for her with his free hand, their meeting of several months ago in perfect replicate, but she is as inconsequential as smoke and he grasps at nothing, fingers hooked like claws tearing at the fabric of reality.

“Estelle!” Borderline frantic, a scream on deaf ears. Her ghost stares at him but through him, no expression on her face, no light in her eyes, a corpse reanimate. 

_I’m sorry—_

He blinks his eyes and she is gone. 

**ii. where the dead men lost their bones**

Rain is falling on his face; it rouses him, but vaguely so: the claws of unconsciousness dig deep in his brain. The ceiling is blurry, almost indistinct, and the thought gives him pause because the sky should be made of storm clouds and not of stone. His eyes finally focus as purple lightning scatters above him, seething and sentient; it crawls into cracks and corners and he shields his eyes from the otherworldly glow.

He recoils from a suddenly unusual sensation and draws his hand back with something grasped between his fingers: a feather, its texture like velvet, its color like blood. 

He shoots upright in alarm and the room turns to liquid; he curses and jams a hand downward to steady himself and a feeling of utter panic rockets up his arm and to his heart as his palm makes contact not with a solid surface but with more feathers, thousands of them in every shade of ruby and crimson and scarlet. 

The air hardens in his lungs and suddenly he can scarcely breathe. The purple lightning arcs again—this time right before his eyes. His heart stutters and his chest explodes; he collapses into the bed of feathers, forces unproductive breaths until his eyes burn hot with tears for the effort and he welcomes the darkness at the edges of his vision.

He retches violently, dislodges something from his throat at last and turns on his side, gags and spits blood-red feathers. Something inside him is suddenly septic, burning with infection: the coughs begin in earnest to expel it and the feathers surge from his mouth with each motion until his lungs turn inside out. The pile of red around him grows. 

Time dilates, grows unbearably long as his body drags itself back together. Reluctant. The feathers are gone from his chest but they are now in his head, beating against the backs of his eyes and ears in an effort to get loose.

Once more the purple light, and at last its source revealed: she floats above him and her eyes are dead and her mouth is frozen open. The pressure in his head is her scream, continuous and horrifyingly real, but only he can hear it.

They bury Estelle the following morning. There is no public display, no citizenry to mourn her death. No grand spectacle as with Emperors before her. There is no casket—Flynn carries her body in stoic silence, his steps heavy and measured by his own shortcomings and failures, and Yuri can meet his friend’s eyes for only a moment before the guilt nearly chokes him. He wants to say _I’m sorry_ as if those two words could somehow remove her blood from his hands, but the words mutate into anger, caustic in his throat. 

The mausoleum greets them with solemn darkness but the sky above it is the most brilliant blue Yuri has ever seen in his life; the poisonous blight is gone, and the planet rejoices. He lingers behind for a moment, allows the others to pass and watches them file in when Estelle suddenly runs past him amid an ethereal trail of light. She pauses at the entrance to her tomb, stares into the gaping maw of darkness, hands clasped before her, oblivious to what lies beyond the threshold. 

Yuri’s heart stops and time stops too, only the two of them and the sound of crashing waves and the feel of salt spray on his face. She turns to him and breeze ruffles her hair though he can scarcely feel it.

_Look Yuri, it’s the ocean—_

She smiles at him for a heartbeat before the wind blows strands of her hair across her face and tears it asunder and all that remains is a void where her eyes should be and Yuri steps back, fire in his chest. Fear. 

Estelle turns away from him, back to the ocean in her memory; wind cascades over her body again, swirls her dress into a helix of pink flowers, thousands of them that scatter and melt into the mausoleum walls. Yuri reaches out to grasp one and it is as insubstantial as mist on his fingers. He cups both hands around it, gentle so as not to crush it. The smell of the sea turns to rancid iron and he opens his fingers, cautious; the petal is gone, only a faint smear of blood left behind. 

The world ends when they bury her, and yet doesn’t end at all. They try—they try so damn hard to hold the pieces together—they hold on until they are just too broken and everything collapses and they drift apart until they don’t exist to one another at all, are nothing but vague images and regretful memories. Shattered pieces that can never be whole again. 

They become bodies without bones, all the coherency of detritus on a river, carried lifelessly on a current of misery. 

They try and stop Alexei because that is the only thing they know how to do as a team any more. 

They try for her, because of her, instead of her.

And Yuri slashes Alexei open until the other man’s innards spill free and the marble floor is slick with red; Alexei does not die screaming and does not die in silence—he dies laughing. 

The apocalypse comes at last: Yuri stares at the end of the world and the abyss stares back with unblinking eyes, beckons to him with a ravenous smile. The end is all smoke and conflagration, just like the hell that Barbos promised him, but as the darkness envelops him there is nothing, an absolute absence of any feeling at all: no reprieve for his suffering—

_You’re safe._

The words arrest his gentle descent; it’s his voice, though his throat does not make it. His body moves as a separate entity as his brain fights for purchase in this swirling reality. His hand reaches out to—

_Estelle_

She’s standing with her back to him, staring out across the distance, into the endless universe. She turns to him, impossibly slow, and the stars behind her burst into cannon fire. 

_I want to continue my journey—_

Her mouth decays as she speaks until it is a gaping wound on her face and the words fade, ending unspoken. She reaches for him even still; her hands bursts into blossoms that gather in his palms but the flowers are all dead and brittle and they crumble without intervention. She stares at him with half a face, oblivious, frozen not in fear but in _finality._ Her body deteriorates until all that Estelle is or was is dull dust running through his fingers. He stares in horror, clutches his hands tight enough to feel the clamor of his heart, but she is no longer his to hold and the abyss reclaims her.

He awakens to a world reborn: a blood-red sky, tentacles writhing and searching for prey, a miasma of aer that sticks like a film in his throat. He rolls to one side, gags on sand and ocean water.

“—Where am—?” 

A shadow falls and he tries to react but the action causes explosions of agony through every extremity and he falls back, squeezes his eyes shut to blot out both the pain and the horror above him.

“You have awakened.”

Yuri forces a name through the tightness in his chest: “Duke?”

Duke retrieves Dein Nomos from beside Yuri’s body and returns the blade to its customary place at his side. “I could not afford to have this sword lost to the sea forever.” 

“Okay…” Barely enunciated for the effort it takes for Yuri to push himself upright. Every breath scorches his lungs, though the ocean air is cool against his tongue. “I still owe you my thanks.”

Duke deflects the gratitude with a glare over his shoulder. “Your arrogance, your attempt to subvert the natural order of the universe, has done nothing but ensure the ruin of civilization.”

Anger blossoms in Yuri’s chest, violent and unchecked. “I did… what I had to do,” he responds, preternaturally calm given the rage trying to gnaw its way loose.

“If you had listened to Phaeroh, instead of—”

“Stop it,” Yuri snarls. “You know _nothing_ about this.”

“You know nothing,” Duke counters evenly. “You dared to defy powers that are beyond your comprehension, were willing to throw away the fate of the world to protect something that was destroying it.”

His infinite coolness only stokes Yuri’s fury. The struggle to keep his voice level is nearly insurmountable and he growls through gritted teeth: “It isn’t— _wasn’t_ her fault.” 

“And yet both she—and the world—are now lost to us.”

Yuri glares at the grains of sand around his fingers until they blur into a solid canvas beneath unshed tears of frustration.

“I will protect our world. Our Terca Lumireis.” Duke turns his face to the sky, stares in silence at the writhing evil there. Yuri struggles to his feet, acutely aware of the weight of his own exhaustion, like chains binding him to the earth,a suffocating weight.

The two men watch the insidious sunset until Duke breaks the silence: “what will you do?”

_Estelle would want—_

**iii. we who were living are now dying**

  
The darkness is sentient and cruel. It worries its way into his body, searches the parts of him laid bare, lashes against his skin. He knows this feeling well—the end of his life is agony untold, nothing but anger and emptiness and failure. He dies every time he closes his eyes and staggers back to consciousness with every waking moment—not alive, because he neither wants nor deserves that—but a body reanimate as an empty form, an artificial existence that is more torture to endure than the dying ever is.

The darkness smothers him, pulls him to the abyss, stills his breath until his vision wavers and lets him go just as death comes to claim him; the escape he so craves dangled inches from his grip, stolen away in a swirl of light.

The world is purple and red and thick with aer; he can scarcely stand against the weight of it, the pain visible outright in his face.

Her body is thousand feet away from him but her scream is right here beside him, burrows into his brain, destroys the last shred of his constitution.

He screams her name but makes no sound. Her body lurches from the atrocious power of aer; it radiates off her like a shockwave and explodes in his chest with a concussive force that drives him to his knees, rips the air from his lungs.

_Estell—_

A fiery projectile impales itself in his chest and stops all thought; he stares down at it, slack-jawed, barely able to draw breath. 

A shaft of a feather is embedded in the flesh beside his heart. 

Trembling fingers reach for it when another crashes into him in a streak of light, and then another: as sharp and accurate as arrows, each one phenomenally painful. They rain down on him in earnest; he grabs one in his hands and yanks it free, blood gushing from the wound, only for two more to hit him in its place.

One pierces his heart at last and everything shatters like crimson-colored glass. His hands clutch at the broken thing but grasp nothing. Only shadow. Shards of crystals scatter like dust from his chest, swirl away and become a glittering stars in a swirling galaxy the color of blood. 

His bones turn to dust and he pitches forward but falls forever, finds no purchase in the void. 

The darkness suffocates him; its weight is terrible and complete.

  
Society crumbles under the gaze of the writing demon in the sky, beneath air seething with magic; humanity breaks from the pervasive heaviness of the end of the world.

The tavern sign in Nor Harbor is falling off one hinge, creaking mournfully as it swings. Yuri shoulders the door open to a dimly lit room bathed in smoke, candles and lux blastia barely cutting through it. Not a single head turns to acknowledge him—in fact, nobody responds at all; their voices are scattered and hushed, the sparse amount of patrons a mixture of guarded postures and dejected expressions. 

He meanders among the tables, sidles up to the bar to find it unoccupied. The stock of liquor behind it is mostly picked clean, bottles smashed and thrown haphazardly. 

Yuri’s eyes travel the length of the bar and alight on a figure hunched at a table in one corner, oblivious to his presence. Emotion surges from his chest: acidic rage, but a heavy pain. Yuri’s calculation of the passage of time is likely skewed by his fall, but Raven appears to have aged a dozen years: hair uncombed and slick with grease, clothes tattered and full of grime, a slackened expression not unlike a corpse. He has a proliferation of bottles around him and is pressing one against his lips when he becomes suddenly aware of the outside stare.

Raven places the bottle on the table quite slowly; his expression is not unlike a man being led to his own execution before he slays the darkness with an entirely unconvincing smile. He says nothing, watches Yuri approach with dread in his eyes he can’t hide. Yuri stops a distance away, close enough for their conversation to be private but far enough to keep his distance. Raven writhes under the silence until at last his eyes flee to the wall, to the floor, to _anywhere_ but Yuri. 

“You look like hell, Old Man.”

Raven snarls derisively, chews on his words for several seconds. He meets Yuri’s eyes for only a moment, and when he finally speaks it is thick with vitriol: “I don’t need your sympathy.”

“Never planned on giving any.”

Yuri slings one leg over the closest chair and leans against the table, studies one of the various empty bottles strewn across it. 

Raven can sense the disgust radiating around the man like heat distortion. “…Never thought I’d see you again,” he says in a lengthy decrescendo in an awkward attempt to diffuse the tension. 

“Don’t get sappy on me, Raven. I’m not here—” 

“I know.”

Yuri’s objection dies on his tongue. Something in Raven’s face gives him pause: lines of weariness, shades of unspoken agony. His body sags into the table as if the wood is the only thing preventing his body from breaking into pieces, staring into the drink as if searching for answers. 

Raven’s eyes slide askance again, his expression unreadable. “What?”

Yuri breaks his stare with a shake of his head. “Nothing.”

The bottle slides toward him; Raven sways dangerously with the effort but the glare in his eyes is frighteningly coherent.

“Want it?” Raven pulls the drink back in response to Yuri’s silence, stares at it regretfully. “I thought the drinkin’ would make her go away, but it never works.”

His words galvanize Yuri’s rage with terrifying intensity. “The _fuck_ did you just say, Old Man?”

Raven laughs but the sound is empty, the last gasps of the dying. “Estelle.”

Yuri gapes at him, steel in his eyes. A curse and a question fight for precedence on his tongue and he lashes out in a rage, snags the nearest bottle and wields it like a weapon. “Start talking. Now.”

“You see her too, don’t you?” A wry smile cuts his face in response to Yuri’s unconscious grimace. The silence draws out, grows heavy until at last Raven spews the words, not in anger but in desperation. “Every time I see her she’s dyin’ and I die right there with her. I come back … but she never does. I relive it every day, but I’m the one still breathing and she’s a ghost. Where’s the justice in that?” 

_Justice._

The word feels perverse in Yuri’s head; a sickening, almost painful thing to behold. What is justice? He chose his path all those months ago without hesitation: an executioner in the darkness, severing the rotted, diseased bastards of the Empire, passing his own judgment.

_Do justice_  
_and_  
_punish the unjust._

Removing a part to save the whole, an infallible solution, delivered without hesitation with his blade, until the part in question is Estelle, a person so far removed from Ragou and Cumore that Yuri stands in the face of an eternal being and denounces his very actions, his entire worldview shaken because there can not be a world without Estelle in it, and yet—

_It’s okay if I have to die._

Rage blurs his vision; the world without her is callous and desolate and knowing his part in it disgusts him. She is the one person whose blood he never wanted on his hands; the color of it is still horrifically brilliant every time he closes his eyes.

“... What do you see?”

The question reins in Yuri’s racing thoughts with a start and he stares, momentarily dumbstruck, unsure whether to be angry or thankful and settling instead on something between the two. He narrows his eyes and hardens his expression; the sudden discovery of their shared suffering offers him only minimal solace and his desire to broach the subject with Raven is even more minuscule. 

“You’re right about one thing, Old Man. There’s no justice in a world without her in it.”

The words cause Raven physical pain. His breath hitches, his voice strangled: “Shoulda been me that killed her. Was all my fault, anyway. Shouldn’t have put you through—”

Yuri cuts in, his tone sharp as the edge of a knife: “She deserved better than you, Raven.”

“I know,” Raven says, infinitesimally small against Yuri’s brutality. “Shoulda had you run the sword through me, too.”

Estelle stands crooked behind Raven, swaying like a broken marionette. She moves silently, like a wraith, and slashes the blade across Raven’s back; smoke bursts from the impact but Raven merely hangs his head solemnly, curls his fingers around the tendrils of smoke swirling around his shoulders as if reaching from some sanity there. Estelle redoubles her grip, parries an imaginary blow, her mouth frozen open in a scream Yuri can hear only in his memory. 

Yuri indulges the Old Man in his offer of drink at last, takes a long pull of the spirit until the vision of Estelle finally wavers before his eyes. 

“Still think we can save the world, Old Man?”

Raven barks a laugh, hollow and dry. He opens his hand and the the smoke spirals away from his palm. “What good is savin’ the world when there’s still horrible people in it?” 

He reaches for a drink to forget and he bottle is scarcely to his lips when Yuri counters him.

“People like you?”

A long pause before Raven swallows. His expression twists somewhere between anger and acceptance and accomplishes neither. He places the bottle on the table without a sound, moves without a stagger and turns to Yuri with absolutely clarity in his eyes: sobering, frightening. 

“Nah, kid. Not just people like me. People like us.” 

Estelle lurches to one side, avoiding an attack that Yuri remembers vividly, relives in his nightmares.

_Are you just going to let your life end like this—_

Yuri’s body moves subconsciously alongside his memory: Estelle lunges at him with her blade outstretched and he follows with an attack across her chest that disarms her, gouges a trail of red from her hip to her shoulder. 

_—like someone else’s tool?_

It is not a release, but perdition; killing her is condemnation for them all. 

Aer erupts from the wound, crackles on her blood, spews from her chest with every beat of her heart. She struggles to stay upright, attempts to cast a healing arte on herself and stumbles into Yuri’s outstretched hands as the effort proves too great. Her ethereal form becomes an impossible weight in his arms and that should not be possible because she is a ghost, dead and buried an eternity ago.

For so long now she has appeared to him without substance; feeling her now is reliving the horror of of the day she died: her power raging out of control, the fabric of reality shredding around her, the planet screaming for mercy. Pain surges through his sword arm; the feeling is molten lead in his skin, unbearably heavy and searing hot. Yuri pulls her against his chest in desperation, searches for her heartbeat with his hands and finds nothing. She responds to his touch with the same ambivalence of every encounter they have had since her death—since he killed her.

Soulless eyes stare through him and there is a universe of misery reflected on their glassy surface.

_Please, before I can hurt anyone else … please …_

_Kill me._

The words echo and multiply in his head until all he can feel is her agony. He readies his sword and the effort is arduous, like moving under water; his entire body protests for the effort. 

“I’ll set you free.”

The blade slides beneath the skin, cleaves the ribs with disturbingly little effort. There is no beating heart to pierce in a body already dead but blood spills all the same, the final punctuation of a life both started too late and ended too soon. 

Remember us—if at all—not as lost  
Violent souls, but only  
As the hollow men


End file.
